Works In Progress - June 2007 - What's up with WROC? Welfare rights organizer explains next steps for Olympia

I have been involved with the Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition (WROC), for a long time. I have a 17 year old daughter and became aware of wroc when she was an infant and we lived in a studio apartment in Seattle. Her father had abandoned us and no one wanted to hire a woman who refused to put her newborn into daycare, insisting she could work with her on her back.

I began receiving AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children), the name then for welfare cash payments. It wasn't much, but thanks to an innovative program called FIP (Families Independence Program), it covered expenses. It was my first experience with state offices and acronyms. FIP was created by policy makers enlightened enough to imagine that if welfare moms were encouraged to go to school, look for living wage jobs, and make wise choices, they would gain financial independence faster. Therefore, rather than splitting payments into a cash grant and food stamps, they provided a lump sum and optional budgeting classes. My daughter and I received slightly more than $700 a month for all our expenses.

I never imagined those would be the good old days, but compared to current welfare reform policies that limit education and push parents into low wage jobs, it was idyllic. Like most welfare recipients, I sometimes experienced respectful and efficient caseworkers, but other caseworkers were rude and unprofessional. They seemed determined to prove that I was beneath them -- that I deserved none of what they reluctantly offered.

These experiences, combined with the impersonal and humiliating operations of the welfare system, caused me to experience self-doubt and to lose confidence in my abilities. It reinforced the negative race and class stereotypes I had been fed by my culture about welfare recipients. In my ignorance, I thought I was different: I had a good reason to collect welfare, unlike the other recipients, whom I viewed as streetwise and dangerous.

Fresh from a closeted, abusive relationship, I didn't have much of a community, but I began to meet other single mothers in my low-rent apartment complex and at the parks and grocery stores. No one better understood what I was going through; we shared information and recounted the traumas of poverty and single-parenthood. Whenever I mentioned a nasty encounter with a welfare caseworker, it always elicited the same response: "Call wroc." So I did. I learned my rights and was given the tools and encouragement to stand up to unfair caseworkers.

When my daughter was a toddler, the fip program ended. Despite fip's success, the policy makers deemed fip too expensive in the short term. By success, I mean that women were finishing their degrees, competing for living wage jobs and leaving assistance for good. The fip recipients I know now own homes and have jobs with benefits that pay living wages and have not needed state assistance for years. Unfortunately, current welfare policies force single parents into a revolving-door life of poverty -- constantly being shoved from welfare benefits, to entry level low-paying jobs, and then back to benefits again -- never allowing them to escape the cycle of poverty that entraps them.

With the end of fip in 1993, my cash grant went down to $440 a month (cash grants have not increased to this day!).I also received slightly under $200 in food stamps. I could no longer afford my $400 studio apartment. I gave my notice and moved further into the low rent district -- into a two-bedroom house I shared with another mother and her son.

Sharing expenses almost enabled welfare to meet our basic needs. The other bonus was our new house was just blocks from the wroc office. I decided to give back to the organization that had given me so much confidence and power in the face of a terribly disempowering bureaucracy. I joined the policy committee and started attending monthly meetings. My daughter got her first taste of videotapes and lunch meat and never failed to remind me of upcoming meetings!

At my first wroc meeting, I was intimidated by the other welfare moms due to my own internalized stereotypes. Far from the negative welfare stereotypes, however, I found them to be kind, intelligent, and resourceful women. Although we came from different backgrounds and had different stories to tell, we shared a fierce commitment to our children's well-being and to social and economic justice. I found an outlet to vent my political frustrations, as well as a community of resourceful and compassionate people.

WROC forms in Olympia

In 1995, when our children were five, my housemate wanted to move to Olympia to continue her education at Evergreen. We decided to keep our household intact, so I found myself in Olympia at the dawn of welfare reform.

I began cleaning houses, earning enough to lower my welfare payments, but not enough to do without them altogether. When my daughter was 8, the state finally increased her absentee father's child support payments from $50 a month to $285. This, along with my earnings, allowed me to terminate my welfare grant, but not before I met other moms in the welfare office who were struggling with the new welfare reform policies. They were being told they had to quit college and look for low wage work and take the first job offered, regardless of whether it paid a living wage. They were told they had to put their children in childcare or lose their welfare benefits, despite a lack of availability of childcare slots, especially for infants.

I looked for wroc, but there was no welfare rights group in Olympia. These women had nowhere to turn. Not only did they need to know their rights, they needed to get together to share, vent, and gain strength and knowledge from each other.

I began to talk to everyone I met about the lack of a local welfare rights group, and I was met with a tremendous amount of interest and support -- not only from other low income parents, willing to make time for social justice amidst their struggles to survive, but from other community members concerned about what was happening to welfare families. Step by step -- with the help of too many people to count -- we built a local chapter of WROC in Olympia.

I worked close to a year without pay, taking advocacy calls, organizing meetings and connecting with other organizations and agencies. But this was unsustainable. It became apparent that for the Olympia chapter of wroc to thrive, we needed a full-time organizer.

WROC Olympia supporters were able to secure a two-year vista position to fund my work. With the stipend I received from vista, I was able to stop house cleaning and do welfare rights work full time!

When the vista position ended, wroc had grown enough financially, in part from our expanded scope, to hire me as a full-time organizer. Ten years of hard work and a lot of community support has turned WROC Olympia into a well-known support system for low-income parents from Tacoma to Vancouver, as well as a political force well known by dshs and state legislators.

WROC board decisions

Like many nonprofit organizations, wroc's board has had its ups and downs. The board has always met in Seattle, where wroc's administrative work is done. Over the years, Olympia and Vancouver have had little to no board representation, as the board is primarily made up of low-income folks who find it difficult to travel. In February of this year, five new members joined the board bringing wroc's total board membership to seven. Although wroc's bylaws express a preference for consensus, board decisions can be made by a majority vote.

Within a month of joining the board, without any notice to the membership or staff, the new board members made a number of surprising decisions. With only a week's notice, they laid off all of wroc's staff, which consisted of me and our executive director of twenty years, who was scheduled to retire in two months because she has terminal breast cancer. With less than a month's notice, they cancelled the annual Seattle fundraiser, which -- in addition to being a central fundraising tool with guaranteed income for the organization -- was to be our executive director's retirement party.

Not surprisingly, the board received a deluge of inquiries from wroc members asking how they planned to continue wroc's work without staff or adequate funding.

Four of the board members resigned, leaving three: one who stood with the concerned members, and two who stood by their decisions and hired an attorney to advise them. Thirty-six wroc members attended an emergency meeting on April 11. When they learned that two of the board members planned to use wroc's dwindling funds to pay an attorney, while claiming not to be able to afford to pay staff, the large majority of attending members demanded that the board members elect new board members or step down.

Members looked to WROC's bylaws for help. Unfortunately, wroc's bylaws do not give members the right to guide the organization. The bylaws guide board members to elect new board members and make decisions with no caveat for member participation. The two board members went to court with their attorneys and received a temporary restraining order against the members, demanding that they alone be recognized as the board. Many people have asked me, who are these women? My answer is, they are us: single mothers, members of WROC. I don't understand their choices or their unwillingness to take direction from WROC members.

A new start

As you might imagine after reading my story, I felt it was important to try to save WROC and continue our important work. So did hundreds of members and supporters. But after two months of attempted negotiations with no progress, the membership has decided to leave the remains of WROC to the two remaining board members and come together to build a new organization that can get back to doing the real work of empowering welfare recipients.

To make that happen, we will need your help. WROC members from Seattle to Vancouver will meet in Olympia on June 2 to build a new organization, one that is truly member run, to continue welfare rights work statewide.

In this difficult time, the Olympia community has been wonderful. Your letters to the board, words of encouragement and fundraising have meant a lot to me and have given me the strength to carry on. I am currently receiving unemployment benefits and looking for work, while trying to maintain the office in Olympia, answer advocacy calls, and build this new organization. I am not doing this alone. We have some regular volunteers, a community jobs worker, and a work study student, thanks to the Center for Community Based Learning.

Please continue to support welfare rights work in our community. To continue, we will need:

1. Financial support: We need people to share their fundraising expertise or make a donation. The Coalition for Low Income Power (CLIP) has provided us with a bank account that can accept donations. You can mail checks made out to clip to our office at 701 Franklin Street SE, Olympia, WA 98501.

2. Technical support for new databases and office systems.

3. Volunteers to visit the local DSHS office, answer phones and do the work that we are here for: empowering low-income parents.

We hold volunteer meetings every Wednesday afternoon at 1:30 at our office in the Payne Room of the First Christian Church at 7th and Franklin. You can reach us at 352-9716 or welfarerights@riseup.net.

Three things I have learned

1. If you are involved in a nonprofit organization, look to your bylaws. If they give the governing body too much power over the members, change them.

2. It's the members who make an organization, not the name or bank account. What we have is the strength of a powerful membership committed to continuing to empower low-income parents with information about their rights and to fight for social and economic justice.

3. I cannot walk away from this work. I would like to serve as the Olympia welfare rights organizer for ten more years, but regardless of what happens I will always delight in watching someone learn to be their own best advocate in the face of oppression.